“Striking chords that range from haunting and heartbreaking to darkly funny and
deeply poignant,” Greenfeld's novel is about a neighborhood in transition and a group of male friends who form unlikely friendships. Here's how the publisher describes the plot of Triburbia:

Thrown together by circumstance, a group of fathers—a sound engineer, a
sculptor, a film producer, a chef, a memoirist, a gangster—meets each morning at
a local Tribeca coffee shop after walking their children to their exclusive
school. The sound engineer looks uncomfortably like the guy on the sex offender
posters strewn around the neighborhood; the memoirist is on the verge of being
outed for fabricating his experiences; and the narcissistic chef puts his quest
for the perfect quail-egg frittata before his children's well-being. Over the
course of a single school year, we are privy to their secrets, passions, and
hopes, and learn of their dreams deferred as they confront harsh realities about
ambition, wealth, and sex. And we meet their wives and children, who together
with these men are discovering the hard truths and welcome surprises that
accompany family, marriage, and real estate at midlife.

Blurbaliciousness: “Triburbia is darkly humorous, occasionally lascivious, unsparing in its
condemnations of the main characters and intrepid in its honest descriptions of
the human conscience.... But it’s not a sad book. It’s a candid one. And a good
one. It is reassuring, cathartic even.” (Downtown Magazine )

Cobb's novel is “a visionary story of defiance, anger, and compassion” which is set in “a time of economic turmoil, virus fears, climate change, fundamentalist
cults and illegal immigrant hardship.” Here's the publisher's jacket copy for The Bird Saviors to whet your appetite:

When a dust storm engulfs her Colorado town and pink snow blankets the streets, a heartbreaking decision faces Ruby Cole, a girl who counts birds. She must either abandon her baby or give in to her father, whom she nicknames Lord God, and marry a man more than twice her age who already has two wives. She chooses to run, which sets in motion an interlocking series of actions and reactions, upending the lives of an equestrian police officer, pawnshop riffraff, a disabled war vet, Nuisance Animal destroyers, and a grieving ornithologist who is studying the decline of bird populations. All the while, a growing criminal enterprise moves from cattle rustling to kidnapping to hijacking fuel tankers and murder as events spin out of control in a world in which the social fabric and economic structures seem on the verge of falling apart.

Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong, had this to say about the book: “Bill Cobb's The Bird Saviors is a stark modern-day Old Testament story in which
the evil that men do is barely balanced by the good that a few manage to
achieve. It's a gritty harrowing story set in a dust-blown Colorado town that
seems filled with vivid characters. Cobb's expert story-telling compels us
forward scene by scene to a final satisfying redemption.”

If you'd like a chance at winning beautiful hardback copies of both Triburbia and The Bird Saviors, all you
have to do is email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY
FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Despite its
name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until
midnight on Aug. 23—at which time I'll
draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 24. If you'd
like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the
words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email
address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third
party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address
for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to
double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by
posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting
it on Twitter. Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional
e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

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The Quivering Pen

The Quivering Pen's motto can be summed up in two words: Book Evangelism. The blog is written and curated by David Abrams, author of the novels Brave Deeds (Grove/ Atlantic, 2017) and Fobbit (Grove/ Atlantic, 2012), from his home office in Butte, Montana. It is fueled by early-morning cups of coffee, the occasional bowl of Cheez-Its, and a lifelong love of good books.